


The One With The Meds

by WhoreOfPromethea



Series: A Clone And An Irwin Walk Into A Bar [6]
Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, F/M, Gen, always bittersweet, fluff sort of, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 22:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15783513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhoreOfPromethea/pseuds/WhoreOfPromethea
Summary: Shaun starts taking his medication. Things can only go up from here.





	The One With The Meds

I knew what was in the cocktail of medication that Doctor Abbey had given me; if asked, I could rattle off the two drug names. Luckily, nobody asked, and so I could take quietly take my antidepressant and antipsychotic in peace. 

They helped. It was a slow progress, and I still heard Not Georgia from time to time, but the visits were few and far between. I focused my attention, then, on my shed, on my furs, and on the real Georgia who shared the cabin with me. 

I wrote updates to Doctor Abbey when she asked, and sometimes even when she didn’t. I wrote about my health, about the improvements to my mental state, and what still needed work. I wrote about Georgia’s health, about her garden. The good doc was at least kind enough to pretend to sound interested in her responses. Then again, maybe she was. The good doc was definitely scary, definitely a mad scientist, but I didn’t doubt for one moment that she was our friend. Maybe hearing these things from us genuinely did please her. 

“Hey, Shaun?” George spoke to me with the same tone that usually preluded her asking me to bring her something. 

“Let me guess, you want a coke?” I smirked, peering over from the kitchen table to where she was sprawled on the couch, reading something on her laptop. 

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

I didn’t mind. Hell, George could ask me to bring her a dozen cokes a day and I wouldn’t mind. I would never, ever get tired of hearing her voice. Maybe it was unhealthy. Maybe it was a clue of how codependent I was. Or maybe, it was just a simple case of being besotted, and finally being allowed to be so without any restriction. 

Whichever it was, George got her coke, and I went back to my email. I had never been good at writing; that was George’s department, but the stuff I was writing wasn’t for the public to read, and so I didn’t care too much about informal or formal language, correct grammar and punctuation, and all that other shit. I just wrote, and then waited. I always got a reply, even if I’d just written a long ass essay about the size of the tomatoes in George’s greenhouse. 

I was grateful to the doc for that; I knew she was busy, what with her mad science and all, so it always meant a lot that she took time to write back. Maybe she thought it was good therapy for me. It wasn’t an incorrect assessment, though. 

George had me and her garden. I had George, my furs, and my emails. I was pretty sure she’d started up a solid correspondence with Mahir and the others again, and I knew she, too, wrote Doctor Abbey. But I was the only one who wrote like I was writing a journal when I emailed our mutual friend. 

Spring came and brought, thankfully, some relief from the freezing winter chill. We ate salads made from the things George grew in her greenhouse, with fried soy ‘meat’ strips. George had never had an issue with meat before, but since her transplant she’d found it harder to stomach, given the knowledge that she had an unknown amount of backup clones who solely existed to be slabs of meat with her likeness. 

The idea of eating anything that had once been alive suddenly disturbed her, and so we switched to soy. The only exception to her discomfort was fish, which she still ate. This, I was glad for, because fish was easy to trade for. I could trade a nice rabbit fur for a salmon or something similar, which we could then cook in butter and herbs from the garden. 

The whole “playing house” thing never really got old for us; sometimes I thought maybe I’d died and gone to some better place, and that this was heaven or something. Whatever. The fact that we could freely be ourselves, without putting on public personas or hiding the true nature of our relationship, that would never get old for me. I was pretty sure George felt the same. 

As long as I got to stay with her, got to wake up next to her every day, got to witness her delight at the prosperous growth of her garden (another differential, but I didn’t care), I couldn’t care less what else happened.

Regardless, I still took my meds every day, like clockwork. I still got bad days; of course I did, I was never going to just recover overnight, even with pharmaceutical help. But the bad days were becoming fewer and further between. I started being able to sleep more, with a few less nightmares. 

Not Georgia liked to appear there and torment me, sometimes, but I always woke up. Usually to the real Georgia sleeping peacefully next to me, UV blocker set down on the side table, chest rising and falling normally. 

Sometimes she would be awake too, struggling with her own demons. We both still had a long, long way to go, but god, I was sure we’d make it through together.


End file.
